Friday, October 12, 2012

Book Note: Falling For Hamlet

Ray, Michelle. Falling for Hamlet. New York: Hachette, 2011. Falling for Hamlet is a novel that resets Hamlet in a modern era and tells it from Ophelia's perspective. I read some of this novel—the tagline ("First Comes Love, Then Comes Madness") is intriguing, after all—but I never really got very far in it. One of the sections I managed to read contained, on page 155, the following text message from Laertes to Ophelia:

Laertes: R u stupid? what did I say?

You may, if you wish, click on the image below to enlarge that page and to read a bit more. That's about where I put the book down, hoping time would fortify me for the rest. Even to my untrained ears, that rang false. It just didn't sound authentic.

Instead of finishing the book and writing a brief review of it, I'll point you all toward the reason I didn't feel a need to finish reading it. Try this astonishingly-funny and magnificently-detailed review by one of the good people of Pursued by a Bear (also embedded below). The reviewer is in the book's target demographic, and she is delightfully-scathing in revealing her thoughts about its inauthenticity.

Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

Bardfilmis normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilmis a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:

KJ is a professor of English and Literature at a small Christian liberal arts college. In addition to courses entitled “Shakespeare” and “Introduction to Shakespeare,” he teaches a course called “Shakespeare and Film.” Recently, he developed a course titled “Modern Shakespearean Fiction.” Shakespeare is also integrated into nearly all his other courses, including courses on the Literature of Food and the Literature of Humor. Additionally, he is the author of Bardfilm: The Shakespeare and Film Microblog. But you may have known that already.